He was here to throw rocks at Miss Edgerton.
She was seated before her vanity table, her profile to him, combing her hair slowly, absently. As she raised her arm to reach the top of her head, the loose, short sleeves of her nightdress slid down to expose her upper arm and—for one heart-stopping fraction of a second—the curve of the side of her breast.
“Miss Edgerton, what are you doing in my room?” he called from the door he had silently opened.
She looked up, gasped, and leaped out of her chair. Hurriedly she grabbed her dressing gown and belted it tight about her person. “My lord, you are quite mistaken. This is my room.”
He cocked his head and smirked. “That’s what they all say. But you, my dear Miss Edgerton, are not married yet. No such hanky-panky for you. Now run along.”
She gaped at him. Well, at least she wasn’t smiling.
It had not made him any happier that the rest of the evening she had not come near him, but instead played cards with Freddie, Wessex, and Miss Beauchamp, smiling all too often. The stupid, illogical part of him still wanted her smiles; worse, he felt downright proprietary toward her.
He strolled inside and sat down at the foot of her bed, which brought him face-to-face with the painting that hung on the opposite wall. It was a canvas approximately three feet by four feet, bursting with a single blood-red rose and its razor-sharp thorns. At its edge were the shoulder and arm of a man lying facedown in the snow, one long black feather, next to his lifeless hand—a definite relation to the painting in the dining room.
Vere loosened his necktie and pulled it off.
“Sir!” Her hands held tight to the closure of her dressing gown. “You cannot—you may not disrobe here.”
“Of course I won’t really disrobe, not with you still here, Miss Edgerton. And why are you still here, by the way?”
“I already told you, sir. This is my room.”
He sighed. “If you insist, I’ll kiss you. But I won’t do anything else.”
“I don’t want to be kissed.”
He smiled at her. “Are you sure?”
To his surprise, she flushed. His own reaction was a flash of acute heat.
He stared at her.
“Please leave,” she said unsteadily.
“Penny! Penny, you are in the wrong room,” Freddie, good old Freddie, called out from the open door.
She fled to him. “Oh, thank you, Lord Frederick. I was at a loss to explain to Lord Vere that he’d made a terrible mistake.”
“No, no, I will prove it to both of you,” Vere claimed loudly. “See, I always put a cigarette under my cover, so that I can have one last drag before I go to sleep.”
He marched to her bed and, to her strangled yelp, flung back her bedcover. There was, of course, nothing there.
He widened his eyes. “Did you smoke my fag, Miss Edgerton?”
“Penny! This really isn’t your room.”
“Oh, all right,” said Vere, throwing up his hands. “Drat it. I like this room.”
“Come now,” Freddie urged him. “It’s late. I’ll take you to your room.”
He was ready to walk away, but at the door Freddie took hold of his arm. “Penny, shouldn’t you say something to Miss Edgerton?”
“Right, of course.” He turned around. “Lovely room you have, Miss Edgerton.”
Freddie nudged him.
“And I do apologize,” Vere added.
With some effort, she wrested her eyes from Freddie. “It’s quite an understandable mistake, sir—our rooms are close.”
Their rooms were close indeed. He was diagonally across the passage from her. The next-closest guests, Freddie and Lady Kingsley, were each two doors away. Yet another indication of her careful planning, to bump more easily into the marquess she’d intended to bag.
As if to demonstrate that she bore no grudges at his faux pas, she directed at him a smile as serene and graceful as any she’d dispensed this entire day. “Good night, my lord.”
He knew very well by now that her smiles had no meaning. He knew she manufactured them the way a forger fabricated crisp twenty-pound banknotes. And he still could not help a new surge of that very old longing.
“Good night, Miss Edgerton.” He bowed. “My apologies once again.”
The height thrilled Elissande at first. A true mountain, so far above the distant plains she might as well be standing on Zeus’s own balcony. The air was thin. A bright, harsh sun shone. A black speck circled distantly in the sky. She raised her hand to shield her eyes from the glare of the sun.
But her hand moved only a few inches. She looked toward it in consternation and blinked. A dark manacle bound her wrist. A chain, each link as big as her fist, protruded from this manacle. The other end of the chain staked into the sinew of the mountain itself.
She looked at her other wrist. The same. Bound like Prometheus. She yanked her wrist. It hurt. She yanked harder. It only hurt more.
Panic, rising as fast as floodwater in a basement. Her heart pounded. Her breaths came in short, inadequate gasps. Please, no. Anything but this.
Anything but this.
A sharp cry pierced the air. The dark speck grew, sinking rapidly toward her. It was a bird—an eagle, its beak as sharp as a knife, and it was nearly upon her. She struggled frantically. Blood trickled from her wrists. But she could not free herself.
The eagle emitted another shriek, its beak plunging into her belly. In her agony she could not even scream, but only thrash madly.
She woke up still thrashing.
It took a few minutes for the residual terror to pass. With still unsteady fingers, she lit her hand-candle and excavated the guidebook to Southern Italy from her undergarment drawer.
“‘West of the village rises the almost vertical wall of limestone precipice that separates the elevated tableland of Anacapri from the eastern part of Capri,’” she read softly to herself. “‘The only way formerly of reaching Anacapri was by an ascent from the beach of eight hundred rude steps, cut in the face of the rock and constructed probably in times anterior to the Roman rule. Now a finely engineered carriage road leads to Anacapri. The views from this road are most beautiful.’”
Vere had joined the Douglas case at Lady Kingsley’s request. He was willing enough—he owed her a favor for her help on the Haysleigh case—but he was not entirely convinced as to Douglas’s guilt. Douglas had been staying at Brown’s Hotel both times, when the trail of the extorted diamonds led there. Each time he also traveled from London to Antwerp, where a large number of diamond dealers had been subjected to extortion tactics.
But Douglas had legitimate reasons to visit both London and Antwerp, important centers for the diamond trade. And even Lady Kingsley, who was sure they had the right man, could not explain why someone who swam in diamonds wanted more diamonds.
“One reason is that he has less than we think he does—he must have exaggerated the richness of his find,” Lady Kingsley whispered to Vere, after a three-hour examination of Douglas’s papers in the latter’s study. “The rumor was that the vein was so extraordinary, any bucket of dirt yielded the fortune of a lifetime. But the reality, not quite.”
Vere hefted a box of documents back to its proper cabinet. “Perhaps there has been theft by the management.”
“There is always that possibility. But if he thought so, he has not gone back in person to check. At least the foreman and the accountants never referenced a visit from him.” Lady Kingsley lifted her lantern high so that Vere could better see where the next box should go. “What about the household accounts?”
Lady Kingsley had a special facility for business documents; Vere had come as her valet this night, his main purpose to stand guard and lift heavy items. But she had needed a rest from reading in the scant light they dared, and Vere had taken the opportunity and checked the household records.